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Announcement - International conference on parallel and distributed systems Image courtesy of polyu.edu.hk  Event: 15th annual international conference on parallel and distriuted systems (ICPADS’09) Venue: Shenzhen, China Dates: Conference: 9-11 December 2009Submissions due: 1 June 2009Notifications of acceptance: 1 September 2009Camera ready version due: 1 October 2009Submission information: Format: two-column IEEE computer societySubmit by Web   Registration ICPADS 2009 will be held in Shenzhen, China, situated just across the border from Hong Kong. The conference provides an international forum for scientists, engineers, and users to exchange and share their experiences, new ideas, and latest research results on all aspects of parallel and distributed systems. Papers accepted for ICPADS 2009 conference and workshops will be published by the IEEE Computer Society.Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:High Performance Computational Biology and BioinformaticsMulti-core and Multithreaded Arch

Announcement - CCGrid-Health Workshop, Shanghai, May 2009 Image courtesy of www.healthcarecomputing.com  Challenges for the application of Grids in Healthcare This workshop is organized in conjunction with the CCGrid conference, in Shanghai, China, 18-21 May 2009.The workshop will provide application developers and computer scientists the opportunity to share and discuss on-going efforts in health-related grid applications and the associated technologies, achievements, gaps, and roadblocks; and to disseminate healthgrid requirements in the grid research community.Important datesPAST Papers Due: 30 December 2008Notification of Acceptance: 30 January 2009Camera-Ready Papers: 15 February 2009Workshop: May 2009OrganizationTony Solomonides University of West EnglandBristol, United KingdomTristan Glatard CREATIS, CNRS, Lyon, FRSilvia D. Olabarriaga Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, NL  

Announcement - Joint symposium BELIEF and 6CHOICE: Distance Learning as e-Infrastructure application Image courtesy of beliefproject.org  Symposium Dates: 28-29 January 2009Venue:  India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, IndiaEvent Web site  Cost: noneRegistration   Contact Important dates: 28 November 2008 - Abstract submission deadline5 December 2008 - Notification of acceptance/rejection16 December 2008 - Camera ready copy submission deadlineThe BELIEF and 6CHOICE consortia are organising a joint symposium, supported by the GLOBAL and 6DEPLOY projects. The event will provide a valuable platform to foster networking and support discussions on e-Infrastructure for Distance Learning which has become one of the top priorities not only of the Indian Government, but of the whole global Learning Society. The scope of the symposium is to understand, together with researchers, developers, users and policy makers, how European and Indian e-Infrastructure links can evolve.Representatives from the Secretary of State for Educat

Feature - Cycle-harvesting around campus in Singapore The NUS Grid Project Team: (from left) Yeo Eng Hee, Wang Junhong (Project Lead), Grace Foo, Tan Chee Chiang (Manager), Zhang Xinhuai. Image courtesy of NUS Grid At the National University of Singapore (NUS), researchers  in the areas of bioinformatics, financial simulation and data-mining had a problem: It was taking days, if not weeks, to run a computation.  The situation encountered by one researcher at the NUS Business School, Dr Ding, was typical. He found that each simulation he needed to do took over ten days to execute on a desktop computer. Clearly, something had to be done.Then came the NUS Grid (also known as Tera-scale Campus Grid or TCG@NUS), overseen by the Computer Center team at NUS. By using technology similar to that of well-known community grids  such as SETI@HOME, FOLDING@HOME and World Community Grid, the team found that they could dramatically cut down computation time. “With the NUS PC grid, we can finish one execution of our pro

Feature - JobGrid connects Chinese graduates with employers Schematic of JobGrid workflow.Image courtesy of Feng Zhou, HUST. Graduates from over 75 universities in China and their potential employers have a new tool to help them find each other: JobGrid.Developed by researchers at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) and Beihang University (BUAA) on a grant from the Ministry of Education of China, JobGrid is the first data grid to provide an authentic, secure, user-friendly communication and decision support platform linking universities, graduates, companies and the government in China. It runs on the China Education and Research Network (CERNET).JobGrid integrates students’ records and relevant personal information from participating Chinese colleges and universities. It converts the dissimilar data to a uniform format, creating a comprehensive, authoritative database with privacy controls. The database supports data storage, extraction and export. Centralized transaction processing handled by a distribute

  Image of the week - Summertime on the Dubna On the river near Dubna, Russia, 228 people from 20 countries and 48 universities and scientific institutes presented 38 plenary reports for the GRID2008 international conference. And since it took place from 30 June to 4 July, these pictures provide a peek into what Russians do on the all-American holiday known as the Fourth of July. Images courtesy of Tatiana A. Strizh, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia    

Link of the week - Life sciences database Image courtesy of lsdb.bii.a-star.edu.sg  Directory service systemThe Life Science Database Directory aims to be a one-stop directory service for Life Science related databases. This effort is coordinated by the Life Sciences Virtual Grid Community (chaired by Dr. Patrick Tan, NCC) under the umbrella of Singapore's National Grid, with contributions from many organizations.Find:Life sciences mirrored databases Post publication databases  Read more.  

Feature - Malaysia’s grid grows in power The Petronas Towers at night, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.Image courtesy of Gregor Pogöschnik, sxc.hu (Editor’s note: We were curious about what people in other parts of the world have to say about the grid. Here’s an excerpt from Malaysia’s "Star Online.”)   Malaysia’s grid computing system, comprising several thousand CPUs at Mimos Bhd’s Technology Park Malaysia headquarters, has been successfully linked to to a European Union-supported grid called Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE).Mimos, an applied research organization, said its KnowledgeGrid Malaysia gained a substantial increase in computing power from the link-up with EGEE, which is made up of several clusters located in Germany, Britain, Austria, Turkey, the Netherlands, Italy and other nations. It will allow Malaysian researchers to collaborate more efficiently and easily with their counterparts outside the country.KnowledgeGrid went through a three-month vetting process with

  Post of the week – Cloud Computing and Political Manipulation Cloud computing services provide users with flexible compute capacity, allowing each user to lease a portion of the greater “cloud” of resources.Image courtesy of exper “Cloud computing is a concept of decentralized, readily available data and collaboration... [It] could be the key to a true global society and economic growth, but international politics is holding it back,” argues Leslie Poston on Profy.Com.“In order for cloud computing to continue to evolve into the borderless, unbiased global tool that it could be, it needs to be separated from politics. Currently, countries like China and the United States are making laws that are having a negative ripple effect on the development of the global cloud, and thus a negative effect on the enrichment of the global economy,” Poston continues.Read the full post on Profy.Com.  

  Feature - WISDOM unplugged: malaria drug-leads graduate to the wet lab The WISDOM project screened one million molecules for their potential to bind to and inhibit “plasmepsin,” a protein essential for survival of the malaria parasite. The parasite can be transferred to a human host via the mosquito vector.Image courtesy of PD-USGOV Hot on the heels of their initial success, WISDOM collaborators have high hopes as their anti-malaria drug-leads move from computer processers to petri dishes.“We’re excited to be at this stage,” says Ana Lucia Da Costa, WISDOM researcher at CNRS, France. “I can’t wait till we get the next set of results back.”The WISDOM project, a collaboration of eight core institutions in five countries, began searching for anti-malaria drugs in 2005. Rather than go straight to the lab, the team used a grid-powered software program to screen for potential drug-leads, searching for small molecules—called ligands—that could bind to and disable the mal

Announcement - Call for participation: Distributed Computing and Grid-technologies in Science and Education, June, Russia Grid specialists from Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Czechia, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and more are expected to attend the 3rd in this international conference series, GRID-2008. Image courtesy of GRID-2008The 3rd International Conference on Distributed Computing and Grid-technologies in Science and Education, also known as GRID’2008, will take place in the Laboratory of Information Technologies of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, in Dubna, Russia, from 30 June to 4 July 2008, is calling for participation. Registration for the conference has also opened.The conference will discuss development of grid technologies in Russia and worldwide, aiming to make plans for further cooperation, to exchange ideas on the creation of grid infrastructures and the development of grid applications in various fields of human activity. The conference will be held in both Russian and Engl

Announcement - Submissions due 19 April: Grid 2008, September, Japan Grid 2008 will be held in Tsukuba, Japan.Image courtesy of Grid 2008Submissions to the 9th IEEE International Conference on Grid Computing—Grid 2008—to be held 29 September to 1 October 2008 in Tsukuba, Japan, are due 19 April 2008.                        Grid 2008 will bring together a community of researchers, developers, practitioners and users involved in grid technology. The meeting will serve as both the premier venue for presenting foremost research results in the area and as a forum for introducing and exploring new concepts. The conference will feature invited talks, pre-coordinated workshops and refereed paper presentations.Grid 2008 welcomes paper and poster submissions on innovative work from researchers in academia, industry and government describing original research work in grid computing. Grid 2008 is hosted in the Science Park City